I was speaking with a Chinese national the other day who expressed great surprise when I told her how widely admired and emulated Traditional Chinese Medicine is. “Really? In China most people prefer medications,” she said. “Maybe 5% of Chinese go in for TCM.”
Well, 5% of the Chinese population is still a lot of people. China is a huge marketing opportunity, not just for manufacturers and raw materials, but for Western holistic practitioners and psychoanalysts.
According to the Washington Post:
Chinese doctors – whose training has been limited to drug prescription – are hungry for new theories and techniques to treat patients. Meanwhile, Freudian psychoanalysts in the United States — often seen as outdated, even irrelevant – are equally keen to gain new ground in China. Connecting the two sides is Skype – an Internet video conferencing technology that didn’t even exist until seven years ago.
Hm, first we export the ego to the East, now we have to export analysis of the ego, too. Great!
A friend, who’s pretty much into eastern philosophy and religion, visited me yesterday, and pointed out to me, that I still was quite caught up in Freudian thinking/analyzing, which to him is of no value whatsoever. While I’m critical of most of Freud’s theories, and think, he was way off the mark when it comes to the unconscious, I nevertheless also think, he’s succeeded to a certain extent in mapping out what makes the ego tick. If nothing else, by demonstrating it at work in his own thinking… And I believe, we need to analyze and understand the ego, if we want to escape its control over us. In that regard, Freud’s ideas are still of value, IMO.